CHECK it out. Then again, you won’t have to. Over the next seven days it’ll be abundantly self-evident:

By the time Super Bowl XXXV is concluded, the combined marketing strategies of the NFL and its affiliated TV networks will have clearly delivered the same message that all sports and their TV partners are delivering: If you’re not an attitudinal 18-year-old, then the Super Bowl really isn’t for you.

Don’t get me wrong. If you don’t fit the above description, you’re still more than welcome to watch, you’re just not the preferred customer.

The NFL and its networks have determined that football games – especially the biggest games – can no longer stand solely as football games. If there’s a target audience to attach to those games, then the game must be exploited on behalf of attracting that particular audience.

And all of sports and all of commercial TV have determined that the only particular audience worth attracting is what has been classified as the young, male demographic. Everyone else is expected to indulge or endure the sell.

That’s why the NFL last week installed youth-oriented musical acts at halftime of the NFC and AFC Championship Games. That’s why the NFL selected MTV to produce this year’s Super Bowl halftime. That’s why several of CBS’s pregame shows, starting this Friday night, will be produced by MTV.

And MTV, if you haven’t been watching (and no matter what it provides the NFL and CBS this weekend), now typically presents a young man holding a microphone with one hand while grabbing his crotch with the other.

Commercial TV has grown so gratuitously violent, so crude, so vulgar, so prurient, so desensitized in order to best attract and entertain males, ages 10-24.

That’s why graphics within games can’t merely appear, they must spin, make Star Wars noises, then explode. That’s why promos for sports telecasts no longer feature skilled play, but players chest-bumping, flexing their muscles and dancing in self-appreciation.

That’s why TV executives have developed buzz words for ever-sleazier programming. They call it “edgy” or “over-the-top” because they’re ashamed to say “vulgar” and “beyond the boundaries of common decency.”

So why sell only football to the young male demographic, when you can turn a football game into a variety show? And if football fans – and fans of all ages – have a bad reaction, too bad for them. Generic football fans are no longer the preferred viewers of football games, just as generic sports fans are no longer the preferred viewers of any sport.

And, because no televised sports event can be what it is – these days, it always has to be something else, in addition – the Super Bowl will make excellent lead-in programming for CBS’s debut of “Survivor 2.”

*

INTERESTING moments Saturday within CNBC’s coverage of the senior PGA tournament in Hawaii:

After CNBC, the Senior Tour’s new primary TV home, cut from green-to-green to show three consecutive longish birdie putts being holed, anchor Mark Rolfing was moved to say, “Ladies and gentlemen, these shots are not on tape.”

That’s an extremely revealing statement because it in essence stated that, 1) golf telecasts so often mislead audiences by showing a string of noteworthy shots on tape as if they’re live, and 2) golf audiences have become so conditioned to the deception that it’s worth pointing out when they’re being treated honestly.

Minutes later, another goodie: Rolfing noted that Leonard Thompson appeared to be playing in a logo-free shirt. If so, said Rolfing, a modern rarity!

*

JEFF Van Gundy expects his players to reduce their propensity for technical fouls by showing some shut-your-mouth respect for the games’ on-court authority figures. At the same time, every time the NBA’s off-court authorities are forced to punish the Knicks, Van Gundy whines about the league the same way Chris Childs and Kurt Thomas gripe to the refs.

Ex-Met Derek Bell, Thursday on Metro’s “GameFace,” about living on his yacht while playing here: “Plenty of times I gave guys rides back into the city . . . Todd Zeile and his wife, Robin Ventura and his wife . . . I would drop them off at Chelsea Pier. They got a little nervous so I had to steer clear of Rikers Island. I’d make a nice wide turn.”

MORE from last week’s high school hoops ugliness: Jerome Tang, the coach who enabled his player to score 101 points in Heritage Christian Academy’s 178-28 win, also serves the Texas school as its youth pastor.

And the 100 points Camden High’s Dajuan Wagner scored on that same night in a 157-67 win represented only the latest in a series of coach-facilitated mindlessness. Last season, late in blowout wins, Wagner was not only allowed to stay in, he used those minutes for show-boating, throwing up 3-point bombs and slam-dunking off alley-oops.

“One thing that has been overlooked in these stories,” said venerable sportscaster Bob Wolff, “is that one kid on each of these teams, kids who go to practice every day but rarely get a chance to play in a game, stayed on the bench so that the two coaches could allow their star players to roll it up.”

On ESPN2 Saturday during Missouri-Virginia, Dick Vitale duly ripped into the coaches of those kids. Good stuff, but he might’ve taken a shot at ESPN, which in two separate reports was delighted by Wagner’s feat.

Meanwhile, the “National High School Sports Record Book” does not include the final scores of the games in listing individual game performances. If it did, we’d see that the overwhelming number of individual records in all sports were facilitated by bully-boy, adult-supervised abuse.